From 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. at the Genesee Street cafe, but just until evening at the location on the SU Hill, you can hear the grind and whir of a blender at Strong Hearts. A Strong Hearts employee drops bananas, swishes soy milk and espresso into the vortex, sprinkles in protein powder and squeezes out maple syrup to craft a whole array of smooth, vegan milkshakes.

With sandwiches such as the “Sweet and Sassy Tofu” and “Egg Trick Muffin,” Strong Hearts’ menu monikers are far from basic. Instead of cutesy riffs on vanilla, strawberry or chocolate, the shakes have names like Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr. On the chalkboard menu, you can also find Ernie Davis and legendary feminist activist Angela Davis — once a visiting professor in Syracuse University’s women’s and gender studies department.

It may seem a bit strange that Strong Hearts’ drinks are named after civil rights leaders. Strong Hearts itself was founded and is owned by two white men. But the leap from pro-black activism to a plant-based diet is closer than you might think.

When Joel Capolongo and Nick Ryan were first firing up Strong Hearts, they had 20 milkshakes on the menu. In the 10 years since Strong Hearts’ founding, there are now 45.

As they were opening the cafe, Ryan and Capolongo were looking for a way to further honor their social justice interests. So they sat down and drummed up a list of positive, influential activists who inspired them — as Capolongo put it: “people who had ‘strong hearts.’” That inaugural list became the basis for how the team named those creamy shakes.

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“We wanted people to come in, get a milkshake and maybe think about something else,” Ryan said. “Think about something bigger.”

Despite Capolongo’s and Ryan’s goal of inspiring Strong Hearts customers, not everyone has felt so warmly moved. Sundiata Addison, a senior at SU, published an essay last semester condemning the milkshake names in the student publication SU Globalists.

Addison had taken up veganism in the fall of 2017. A close friend had challenged her to try it and besides, she was lactose intolerant. Sick of dining hall fare, she became a frequenter of Strong Hearts. As she waited for her usual “Texas Tofu” wrap one day, Addison realized she was in the mood for a drink. She scanned the menu. Her eyes caught on the Martin Luther King Jr. shake, and she thought perhaps the naming was coincidental.

But she noticed a pattern: Not only were most of the shakes named after black activists, but these shakes were also the ones with chocolate. Where Fred Hampton was Oreo, Nat Turner was a fudgy banana and Muhammad Ali was espresso, Edward Abbey was pineapple and Carl Sagan was raspberry. It didn’t sit right with Addison.

“Why couldn’t a Martin Luther King drink be vanilla or raspberry-flavored?” she asked in her article. Looking back, she realized her freshman self had just ignored the discomfort.

“Over the years of being here, I don’t think anything is a coincidence when it comes to race anymore. I’ve become more skeptical,” Addison said. Addison is a communication and rhetorical studies major and an African American studies minor. Because of the latter, Addison said she spends a lot of time researching race and reading black literature.

“There’s just been a history of correlating people of color to things that are dehumanizing,” Addison said. “So, correlating someone’s skin to a flavor of food — it’s pretty dehumanizing, in my opinion. Which is what made me look further into it.”

In the resulting SU Globalists post, Addison explains how equating black people’s skin tones to caramel and chocolate is a form objectification. Addison, who is dark-skinned, also recalls how her third-grade peers refused to eat chocolate ice cream in fear of looking like her. She remembers being called “brownie” and “burnt toast.” Next to her academic research, these microaggressions have solidified her stance that Strong Hearts’ milkshake names are problematic.

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Just like with the semantics of Black Lives Matter versus “all lives matter,” Addison said, there are some issues that white people should defer to people of color on. When she was told the story behind Strong Hearts’ milkshakes, Addison acknowledged, as she did in her essay, that the intentions were probably good.

“I’m sure that it wasn’t malicious. I never thought of it that way,” Addison said. She added that being more sensitive in terms of race is crucially important for society moving forward.

When it comes to environmental and social justice issues, however, Capolongo and Ryan spoke to how they fully recognize the intersection of the two.

“I think human rights and environmental rights go hand-in-hand,” Capolongo said. “They’re often abused at the same time.”

He went onto explain how he and Ryan have advocated for people of color, for women and for the LGBTQ community. In addition to a cookie dough shake named after Gay Liberation Front leader Sylvia Rivera and the peanut butter one for Davis, who is lesbian, Strong Hearts has been and strives to be trans-inclusive in its hiring process.

Capolongo said that no matter what the issue is, they’ve always tried to be on the right side of it. He likes to think that he and Ryan have achieved that for the most part.

“We’re not perfect. We’re two middle-class, white guys, you know? But we’re doing the best we can, given our privilege,” Capolongo said.

Ryan said he hopes that customers can come in and learn something new from the milkshakes. Some black activists who might be overlooked, for example, have drinks in their honor at Strong Hearts. Ken Saro-Wiwa, a Nigerian environmental rights advocate, is the namesake of a peanut butter chocolate drink. Paul Rusesabagina, the hotel manager who hid refugees during the Rwandan genocide, has a pina colada shake named after him.

Taylyn Washington-Harmon, an SU alumna and former fashion columnist with The Daily Orange who worked at Strong Hearts during her junior and senior years, said the drink names taught her something new about people like Steve Biko and Howard Zinn.

“I think it’s a good window for people to educate themselves on lesser-known activists,” she said.

Washington-Harmon will be vegan for five years this October. As a freshman at SU, she went to a tattoo parlor with her friend Doris Huang. Huang was getting her first tattoo: “Vegan or death.” The process sparked a conversation in which Washington-Harmon learned about the benefits of veganism.

Like Ryan and Capolongo, Washington-Harmon sees strong ties between prioritizing the earth and championing civil rights.

“Environmental justice is racial justice,” she said, giving the example of Flint, Michigan. Washington-Harmon, who currently lives in New York City, pointed to how the city’s pollution disproportionately affects poor communities of color.

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Aph Ko, co-author of “Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism and Black Veganism from Two Sisters” and founder of Black Vegans Rock, switched to a plant-based lifestyle four years ago for political reasons. Identifying as a “decolonial activist,” Ko discovered the link between animal consumption and colonialism in her graduate school research.

“Black veganism is a racial theory that recognizes that white supremacy is both anti-black and anti-animal. Once when you reframe it like that, you start to have a stronger motivation to not participate in animal suffering,” Ko said in an email. “(The environment’s) disheveled condition is an aftermath of colonialism and the only way to create a solution is to take our time to properly understand what has caused the problem to begin with.”

Many Syracuse residents probably aren’t thinking about racial, environmental trauma when they swing by Marshall Street. But Strong Hearts’ milkshakes give visitors a chance to eat wholesome, appealing food and do so consciously.

That idea is intrinsic to Strong Hearts’ legacy and its future. Ryan said he doesn’t see distinct lines around different kinds of justice. For him, everything is on the table.

“That’s not to say one thing is more important than the other or everything’s equal. But there are levels and more immediate problems than others,” Ryan said. “But at the end of the day, we’ve got to figure everything out.”

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Published on April 18, 2018 at 10:45 pm